2 Psychological Conversion Triggers You Should Be Using To Increase Your Revenue

There are multiple emotions that pull at us throughout the buying cycle. Some may be affected by price, by value, or by quality. Some, on the other hand, are the re-affirming and pressuring psychological factors that will make the difference between a sale or a bounce.

Unfortunately, most sites overlook these factors. These sites either fail, or never reach the top of their potential.

The two main psychological factors that will inspire a purchase, sign up, or register are credibility and urgency.

So how can you show credibility and add urgency to your site? How can you make sure these emotions are pulling on customers throughout the buying cycle… so they can’t wait to click your call-to-action button?

1. Showing Credibility

Credibility is very straight-forward; it’s all about trust. If you can limit the possible reasons a visitor would distrust your business, you will increase conversions. Using these three principles you can drastically improve the credibility of your site:

Think of this in terms of a physical store. If nothing aligned with a central brand, you wouldn’t have as much trust in each individual product. However if you go into an IKEA, and you understand exactly what you’re getting with IKEA products, you have more trust in buying the products because you know what to expect.

This kind of cohesiveness will increase conversions immediately, but even more importantly, it will breed long-term brand trust that will keep your customers coming back for more.

Personability

People don’t want to be connected to a brand, they want to be connected to other people.

People want to be treated like individuals, not as customers.

By making your copy, product descriptions, headlines, promotions, and other content more personal you can create a higher level of trust by speaking directly to the customer, person to person.

Use “you” and “your” in calls to action to inspire action. Speak in first person on your blog—using “I” rather than “we”—to give readers and customers a more connected sense to you and your business.

Businesses like GoPro use this method to empower their customers and to inspire and motivate them, not only to buy their products but to use them and feed content back into the community.

Social proof

Using testimonials, social following, and other social proof signals will give customers the assurance that your product or service is well respected, widely used, or well known, which will ease anxiety and, therefore, help with conversions.

There are multiple ways to do this, and each one should be thought about and tested to your unique use-case.

For example, Slack has used a video on their homepage showing social proof for their productivity tool.

This is a way to not just show the effectiveness of the tool through features and uses, but through a real example.

Zirtual has a similar focus with their homepage, showing rather than telling with a real-world testimonial from a successful customer.

2. Creating Urgency

Urgency is the harder, less straight-forward factor to implement—though, by far, the most effective.

Adding urgency to your sales timeline can dramatically increase desire for your product and set a powerful anchor in your customer’s psyche. It changes people’s thinking from “whether to buy from you or your competitor” to “whether to buy your product now or miss out altogether.”

Typically if it’s something they want, they will be far more likely to convert quickly. This comes down to a few simple principles:

Time

Is the product on a strict timeline? Is there only a limited amount of hours left to buy? Is there a potential benefit to buying now as opposed to later, per a discount or shipping option?

These sort of time-focused principles can dramatically increase the urgency of your offer without having to set up any other limitations around your product. There’s a reason infomercials used the “if you call in the next 30 seconds” line. Because it works psychologically.

Conversion Rate Experts proved this as a very effective method by simply adding a clock to category pages on a Florist’s e-commerce site, with a countdown for same-day delivery.

Supply

By creating a limit in supply, you can drastically increase the level of demand on a product, which increases the potential of quick conversions. If the test runs well, you can always add to the supply later. You can also charge a premium with a limited supply.

DON’T MISS OUT

Sean is an inbound marketing consultant and marketing director at SimpleTiger. Sean consults startups on SEO, CRO, and inbound marketing and writes about it around the web. Hear more from Sean and connect with him on Twitter @snsmth.

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